Justified Recap: The Chicken Dance

Justified Recap: The Chicken Dance

Tone is a crucial thing for a TV series to master, and a show that can successfully shift between a few different tones operates at a distinct advantage. Justified has always been that way, with its Elmore Leonard roots and winking jokes about Raylan's hat and Boyd hamming it up at every turn. I know everybody wasn't the biggest fan of the Dewey Crowe kidney-hunt episode last season, but I thought it was a perfect example of the elasticity of the show's tone.

"This Bird Has Flown" had that same multiplicity of tones, with the gravity of the Ellen May stuff, and even Raylan's semisweet sadness over Lindsey's betrayal, undercut by the essential silliness of the fact that in the end, Randall and Lindsey's crime spree was all about chickens. The drawback, unfortunately, was that I was having a real hard time buying Randall from one scene to the next. Robert Baker's not a bad actor, but his shifts from "badass" to "chicken-eyed dreamer" and back again felt more like inconsistency than elasticity. Read More...